locked up the warehouse and insisted I accompany them to a lively local bar where beer and seafood was in plentiful supply. Zaid toasted me with a wry smile on his face. ‘Good luck with your book,’ he told me. ‘Just make sure you tell the truth.’
For a few moments, it felt as if there was a threateningtone in his voice but there again I might have been imagining it.
At the end of the evening, I tried to pay the bill for everyone but Zaid insisted it was down to him. Then I noticed the barman refusing any cash from Zaid … it seems that people like Zaid are not expected to pay for anything thanks to their reputation in the community.
A few months later, I got a call from my lawyer friend in Málaga to say that Zaid had been shot dead by a hitman outside his own warehouse.
What goes around comes around.
CHAPTER 5
KING OF THE COSTA DEL HASH
Spain became a very popular destination for British criminals on the run following the collapse of the extradition treaty between the two countries in 1978. When the thieves behind London’s notorious 1983 £6 million Security Express robbery were spotted leading luxurious lives on the Costa del Sol it was even dubbed ‘The Costa del Crime’. It wasn’t until seven years later that Britain and Spain agreed a new extradition treaty when Spain joined the European Union.
In 2000, the then British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, finalised a new fast-track extradition treaty with the Spanish authorities, but it did little to stem the tide of crime rolling across Spain.
And still the Brits keep coming in. A seventy-five-year-old Briton was arrested by the Guardia Civil in 2011 on a yacht, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, which was found to be carrying 1,038 kilos of hashish worth €1.6 million on the drugs market.
As it happens, my interest in the secret and lucrative world of hash had partly been fuelled by living in southern Spain between 2000 and 2007. Working on a number of books about real-life British criminals living in the sun, I’d found that for all their bravado about robbing banks and security vans in the 1970s and 1980s, the most successful ones virtually all made their biggest fortune from drugs.
Some had even paid the ultimate price and lost their lives in pursuit of that elusive drugs ‘lottery win’ which they believed would enable them to quit crime altogether and enjoy a long and happy retirement.
Take Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson: his underworld infamy came directly from that so-called Crime of the Century in 1963. But the £40,000 which each of the robbers ended up making from the raid was never going to be enough for these characters to give up crime. South Londoner Wilson was considered one of the masterminds of the GTR and even escaped from prison for more than two years in the middle of serving a thirty-year sentence for his role in the robbery.
But when he finally got out in the mid-1980s, he found the underworld had changed beyond all recognition. Blaggings and robberies had been replaced by drugs as the main source of income for top level London villains. Charlie Wilson, ever the pragmatist, soon acknowledged that he needed to get a piece of the action from drugs sooner rather than later.
So he moved down to southern Spain, the infamous Costa del Crime, and began financing and running some of theera’s most lucrative drugs deals. At first he kept strictly to hash because he knew, like so many others, that the sentences were much lighter than for cocaine. But the lure of the ‘white stuff’ proved too much to resist in the end and he set up a second ‘importation business’ from his home near Marbella, which dealt exclusively in coke. Meanwhile his hash runs continued to operate but on a much smaller scale.
Wilson himself loathed hash as a recreational drug because of the way it seemed to dull your senses. Cocaine, on the other hand, improved one’s reactions and kept one feeling on top of the world. He even told one criminal
For a few moments, it felt as if there was a threateningtone in his voice but there again I might have been imagining it.
At the end of the evening, I tried to pay the bill for everyone but Zaid insisted it was down to him. Then I noticed the barman refusing any cash from Zaid … it seems that people like Zaid are not expected to pay for anything thanks to their reputation in the community.
A few months later, I got a call from my lawyer friend in Málaga to say that Zaid had been shot dead by a hitman outside his own warehouse.
What goes around comes around.
CHAPTER 5
KING OF THE COSTA DEL HASH
Spain became a very popular destination for British criminals on the run following the collapse of the extradition treaty between the two countries in 1978. When the thieves behind London’s notorious 1983 £6 million Security Express robbery were spotted leading luxurious lives on the Costa del Sol it was even dubbed ‘The Costa del Crime’. It wasn’t until seven years later that Britain and Spain agreed a new extradition treaty when Spain joined the European Union.
In 2000, the then British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, finalised a new fast-track extradition treaty with the Spanish authorities, but it did little to stem the tide of crime rolling across Spain.
And still the Brits keep coming in. A seventy-five-year-old Briton was arrested by the Guardia Civil in 2011 on a yacht, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, which was found to be carrying 1,038 kilos of hashish worth €1.6 million on the drugs market.
As it happens, my interest in the secret and lucrative world of hash had partly been fuelled by living in southern Spain between 2000 and 2007. Working on a number of books about real-life British criminals living in the sun, I’d found that for all their bravado about robbing banks and security vans in the 1970s and 1980s, the most successful ones virtually all made their biggest fortune from drugs.
Some had even paid the ultimate price and lost their lives in pursuit of that elusive drugs ‘lottery win’ which they believed would enable them to quit crime altogether and enjoy a long and happy retirement.
Take Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson: his underworld infamy came directly from that so-called Crime of the Century in 1963. But the £40,000 which each of the robbers ended up making from the raid was never going to be enough for these characters to give up crime. South Londoner Wilson was considered one of the masterminds of the GTR and even escaped from prison for more than two years in the middle of serving a thirty-year sentence for his role in the robbery.
But when he finally got out in the mid-1980s, he found the underworld had changed beyond all recognition. Blaggings and robberies had been replaced by drugs as the main source of income for top level London villains. Charlie Wilson, ever the pragmatist, soon acknowledged that he needed to get a piece of the action from drugs sooner rather than later.
So he moved down to southern Spain, the infamous Costa del Crime, and began financing and running some of theera’s most lucrative drugs deals. At first he kept strictly to hash because he knew, like so many others, that the sentences were much lighter than for cocaine. But the lure of the ‘white stuff’ proved too much to resist in the end and he set up a second ‘importation business’ from his home near Marbella, which dealt exclusively in coke. Meanwhile his hash runs continued to operate but on a much smaller scale.
Wilson himself loathed hash as a recreational drug because of the way it seemed to dull your senses. Cocaine, on the other hand, improved one’s reactions and kept one feeling on top of the world. He even told one criminal
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